S.F. police say they have adopted reforms

San Francisco police say they are nearly finished adopting the 272 reforms recommended by the federal and state departments of justice, closing a major chapter in a more than seven-year effort to mend the public’s trust following a string of high-profile police shootings.

Police officials said the department submitted evidence that it completed the final 27 recommendations to the California Department of Justice this month, but it is still awaiting approval and a final report from state officials.

“Our hard-working officers are doing a remarkable job protecting the public and earning trust with communities,” Chief Bill Scott said in a statement, noting that crime rates are also down in every major category this year.

The department’s reform initiative began in 2016, following a series of controversies that included the 2015 fatal police shooting of Mario Woods in the city’s Bayview district. Amid public outcry, city officials asked then-President Barack Obama’s DOJ to assess how the department could improve.

Former San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr resigned amid the turmoil, hours after police fatally shot Jessica Williams in May 2016 as she tried to flee from officers in a car they suspected was stolen.

Obama’s office of Community Oriented Policing Services issued a 431-page report detailing 272 recommendations to transform policing in the city, with an emphasis on reducing uses of force, racial equity, data collection and public transparency.

Scott, a former Los Angeles Police Department assistant chief with a 13-year track record of reform experience, was tapped by then-Mayor Ed Lee months later.

Scott promised to continue the department’s reform efforts after then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions put an end to the office’s community policing program in September 2017, asking the state’s attorney general to oversee the progress.

City officials said the reforms have quantifiably paid off. Among its successes, officials said use-offorce incidents decreased by 65% from 2016 to 2022; Black, Asian, Hispanic and American Indian recruits increased from 52% in 2016 to 81% in 2023, and police shootings dropped by 50% in the seven years since beginning the DOJ review compared to the seven years before it.

Police additionally expanded their de-escalation and crisis-intervention training programs, and established a new data collection system to track uses of force.

The department’s compliance of the recommendations has accelerated over the past few years, after what was criticized as a sluggish start. In March 2020, a state DOJ report said police had only adopted 15% of the recommendations and was thereby “delaying the SFPD’s fulfillment of its promise to the community to get this work done.”

Racial disparities remain persistent in the department’s uses of force. In the first half of 2023, the San Francisco Police Department reported using force against Black people 502 times, compared with 311 times against Hispanic people, 223 against white people and 80 times against Asian people. Black people make up about 5% of the city’s population.

San Francisco police spokesman Evan Sernoffsky said police use force on criminal suspects regardless of their race, and said the data doesn’t capture other information like the subject’s city of residence and underlying crime.

Mayor London Breed, then a city supervisor, was among the officials who joined Lee in asking for the DOJ review in 2016. In an interview this week, Breed said she had initially hoped that the reforms would happen right away, but later shifted her perspective.

“As far as I’m concerned, it shouldn’t be about the time, it should be about the effectiveness,” she said. “It should be about looking at the data of this department and how it has turned around considerably as a result of the work that we’ve done.”

Breed said she thought San Francisco had done “an incredible job” of reducing police misconduct since the reform efforts began.

Jon Henry, executive director of the San Francisco advocacy group Both Sides of the Conversation, said police “definitely have a better relationship” with the city’s communities of color.

“When you’re dealing with the Black and brown communities, you’re always going to have a little bit of a divide,” Henry said. “But I think that with the engagement that Chief Scott has been doing with the community, trying to find a way to bring the community and the police together, has definitely been a positive.”

“Are we where we need to be and where we want to be, 100%? No, but that’s a work in progress,” Henry said. “We’re getting there.”